As motel names go, it’s certainly more portentous than “Bates”. But destiny of a sort, shaped by class and money and family abuse, is waiting for the hero and heroine of this movie. This is an erotic noir thriller from Karim Aïnouz; a noir lit mostly by bright sunshine, shot with garish glee by Hélène Louvart. It takes place in a brutally functional love motel near the beach in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Ceará; this is a place from which the couple are fated to be expelled naked, like Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
Motel Destino is co-written by Wislan Esmeraldo and Mauricio Zacharias and directed by Aïnouz who had a film in the Cannes competition just last year, an atypically florid historical costume drama called Firebrand, with Jude Law as the fleshily hindquartered Henry VIII. This is a leaner, meaner movie and Aïnouz is more engaged. Heraldo, played by Iago Xavier, is a young guy employed by a drug-dealing mob matriarch along with his brother, who is trying to dissuade him from his plans to leave the neighbourhood and try his luck in Sāo Paulo.
